Tag Archives: contemporary American literature

I remember when I was growing up my dad had a copy of E L Doctorow’s Ragtime on the bookshelf. Given my dad was a big fan of early jazz, I had at that time assumed that the book was a history of Ragtime. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that Doctorow was a novelist and it has taken until now for me to get round to reading any of his work.

Homer and Langley is a fictionalised account of two real-life brothers Homer and Langley Collyer who lived in the bourgeois suburbs of New York in the first half of the twentieth century and earned reputations as being eccentric. In real-life the two brothers, one of whom, Homer, went blind, became increasingly withdrawn from society, paranoid and dependent upon each other. They died in March 1947 after which police discovered the body of Homer in his armchair, who had starved to death. Their mansion was piled high with collected rubbish and newspapers that they had hoarded over the years. During the clear-out the police finally found the body of Langley, buried beneath mountains of rubbish. The assumption is that Langley had fallen foul of one of the many booby traps he had set around the house to protect them from imaginary intruders and had become trapped beneath the debris. Homer had simply died waiting for his brother to come and attend to him.

Doctorow takes considerable liberties with history. He makes Langley the older brother (whereas in real life the opposite was the case) and he stretches their lives well into the 1970s. Homer becomes blind as a teenager due to an illness that causes gradual deterioration. In reality, Homer became blind much later, in the early 1930s after suffering a stroke. In adjusting the timeframe in this way, Doctorow uses their story to comment on American society at critical times during the twentieth century. The narrative leaps quickly across the decades so that we get a snapshot of a particular period of a few months before moving us swiftly on to a number of years later.

Where Doctorow is most successful is by painting a picture not of delusional madness, of everybody’s worst neighbours, but of extraordinary brotherly love in the face of a series of tragedies. They are abandoned by society as much as society abandons them and their withdrawal is an exercise in self-reliance and resilience as much as anything else. Time and again Homer and Langley are shown to be kind-hearted, well-meaning, non-judgmental, finding solidarity with others on the edge of society. They are, in their own way, brilliant, but unable to function in a rapidly changing society. Their hoarding is an ultimately doomed attempt to keep control of their lives and the outside world, but when the outside world invades their lives, they are shown to continually struggle and fail to successfully manage it.

By narrating the story through the eyes of the blind Homer (pun intended), Doctorow allows us to enter their world and their struggles, well-intentioned but destined to end in yet further tragedy. And, of course, by allowing us to view history through the lives of people living on the very edge of a society that rejects them, he is able to make comment upon society itself. This is a deeply affectionate portrait of two brothers who don’t quite fit.

The majority of Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin Takes place in and around New York in August 1974. New York is Dublin-born McCann’s adopted home and this is very definitely a New York novel, where the character of the city looms large. The starting point for the novel is a fictionalised version of a true event when Philippe Petit walked between the twin towera of the World Trade Center on a tightrope. It is this death-defying feat that locates the novel in its particular time and place, a time of political and social change and upheaval in the wake of the events of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Nixon. And, of course, New ork, the melting pot, where prostitutes and drug addicts rub shoulders with judges’ wives, recent immigrants and bohemian artists. McCann uses this point in history to relate the stories of a varied cast of characters, who together represent this multi-dimensional city. Like the charcaters on the busy streets, looking up at the tightrope walker, their stories also rib shoulders and intertwine.

On one page there is a reproduction of a photograph taken of Petit’s actual tightrope walk, although here it is fictionalised and attributed to one of the characters in the book. As the tightrope walker makes his way between the Twin Towers, in the top left hand corner an aeroplane speeds by, in an eerie anticipation of the event of almost thirty years later. And, of course, this is really a 9/11 story, in spite of its setting in 1974. The final section of the novel takes place in 2006.

This is ultimately a geneous and tender portrayal of New York and New Yorkers. It is a city of ordinary people, trying to do what’s right and get by, disconnected (indeed victims of) the greater political context – whether that is the war in Vietnam or the war in Iraq (part of the context of the latter part of the novel). McCann has the benefits of being both an outsider and an insider and his message is clear and articulate. There is a compassion with a people who suffer history, rather than make it, and just as the tightrope walker travels betwen the Twin Towers, so do they (and, by extension, we) travel precariously between events of political magnitude. Careful not to look down, one smallmistake could cause us to fall off our tightropes.

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster is so short that it feels like something of a cheat including it on this list at all. In fact, unless I keep this review relatively short it runs the risk of being longer than the book itself. Well, not quite, but you get the idea!

I’ve read a fair bit of Paul Auster over the past few years and I’ve found a mixed reaction from others who have read him. Some find him a superb craftsman, an American Samuel Beckett; others find him pretentious. I can see the position of both camps and whilst I generally like Auster’s work, I do so not without reservation.

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story tells the story of a writer – in the book he remains nameless, but we are meant to assume, I guess, that it is Auster himself – who receives a commission to write a christmas story for a magazine. The writer is unsure how to write about christmas without lapsing into cloying sentimentality. That is until he confides his problem to Auggie Wren, who works in the local tobacconist shop. Auggie tells the writer an unsentimental christmas story, which becomes the story the writer uses for his commission and the story within this short book. Whether the story is entirely unsentimental is rather debatable, but it is undoubtedly a simple, moving story, full of humanity. And this, I think, is where Auster is at his best – when he is describing the human relationships between ordinary people and their extraordinary lives, rather than the pseudo-Beckettian ramblings of In ther Scriptorium, for example.

Some years ago Auster participated in a radio project where he asked listeners to send in their stories of extraordinary incidences and coincidences. He read the results on air and published them in Tales of American Lives. It is a wonderfully humble testament to the extraordinariness of the everyday and Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story is in the same vein.

I should also mention the wonderful illustrations by ‘ISOL’ that accompany the story. If you have a spare half hour or so, it is worth spending it with this handsome little book.